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“The aim would be for staff to transfer across to our service provider and stay within the St George office. If we go ahead, no employee would be worse off."

The cuts would be the latest in a string of firings that have hit the financial services industry hard. Westpac has signalled plans to slash 560 roles and earlier this month ANZ Banking Group axed 230 staff as part of its plans to cut 1000 positions.

Macquarie
’s domestic business cut 626 jobs in the nine months to December 31, and almost 900 staff were dropped globally. Analysts at UBS estimate 7000 jobs could be cut in the financial services sector.

Last month Westpac’s new technology chief, Clive Whincup, said the bank would forge ahead with ambitious IT plans despite redundancies and headcount reductions.

“Our internal flexibility and agility will be hugely improved, but it is a painful process to go through to get there," he said.

“I am convinced that we will end up with a much more effective, flexible and agile applications environment to work in and I am convinced that it will give us huge benefits in the future."

Commonwealth Bank of Australia
chief executive
Ian Narev
said recently outsourcing led to poorer customer service and operational risks. He assured staff there were no mass redundancy plans. “In my experience – particularly 10 years of looking at different business cases with offshoring and labour cost arbitrage – the number of disappointments you get with service levels and operational risks on the people who are actually doing this for you overseas, never gets factored well enough into the business cases." he said.